Work with Creative Cloud Libraries in XD

Creative Cloud Libraries help your team to centrally manage and distribute design and brand systems assets at scale.

Start by curating your sticker sheet with a set of components and styles that constitute design and brand system in an XD cloud document. When ready to share those reusable assets with your broader team, publish your sticker sheet cloud document as a library and invite your teams, with the right set of permissions.

Once your team accept the library invitations, they can reuse assets from that library and be in sync with any future library updates.

Sounds familiar? If you want to publish all assets and components to a library and invite others to consume your design systems from XD, look no further! 

Before you proceed

Be familiar with these concepts in XD:

• Design systems
• Work with assets and libraries
• Components in XD

Publish and share linked libraries

To build and distribute a design system through libraries, start by curating your design system assets (colors, character styles, and components) in the Document Assets panel of your source cloud document.

Once you define your design system assets, publish those assets as a library linked to your source document. Share them with your team to reuse them consistently across all your XD projects and other Creative Cloud apps.

Publish a linked library

To publish a linked library, follow these steps:

1. Click Libraries in the toolbar and open the Document Assets panel view. 
   
2. Click Publish as a library   to open the Libraries manager.
3. In the Libraries manager, click Publish. Alternatively, click Create new and then click Publish linked library.

The published library contains all the assets in the Document Assets panel of your source document.

 You can add assets to a linked library only from its source document but can consume the assets in any Creative Cloud apps. If you choose Create new > Create empty library, you get a regular Creative Cloud library not linked to the cloud document. You can add assets to a regular Creative Cloud library from any Creative Cloud app.

Publish a team library

If you are a Creative Cloud for teams or enterprise user, in addition to publishing a personal library, you maybe able to publish team libraries. Team libraries have shared ownership.

To publish a team library, follow the steps below:

1. Open the library manager.
2. Choose Create new > Create empty library, or Publish linked library.
3. Select the team space, and publish the team library.

To learn about team libraries and its benefits, see Creative Cloud Libraries for business.

Share a library

Once you publish the library, the Share dialog will appear to help you invite your team members.

Invite document coeditors to libraries with edit permissions

 Cloud document permissions don't automatically sync with its linked library. So, when you publish a library, ensure that you invite all your document coeditors to the library with Can edit permissions.

What happens if document coeditors don't have edit permissions to the library?

There can only be one linked library for a cloud document. So, if you don't invite a document coeditor to your library, the coeditor can publish a new library from the same document without knowing that a library already exists. When the coeditor publishes a new library, it gets linked to the document and your original library gets delinked. 

If you invite a coeditor to the library with Can view permission, the coeditor won't get an option to update the library. They will see an Up to date status in the Libraries window of the source document. 

Learn with an example

1. Natalia is the owner of an XD document, Brand_Systems, and invites Pedro as a coeditor to the document.
2. Natalia creates a linked library from the document, which is also automatically named as Brand_Systems, and forgets to invite Pedro to the library.
3. Pedro adds new assets to the document and wants to publish a library unaware that a linked library exists.
   
4. Pedro selects the Publish button in the Libraries window of the document, creating a new linked library, Brand_Systems(1) in the process. Creation of Brand_Systems(1) delinks the original library from the document.
5. Natalia sees that links to the assets in the library from another document are now broken.

Did your original library get delinked from the source document by a coeditor? See Relink library with source document.

Best practices

• When you publish a new linked library from your cloud document, ensure that you invite all the document coeditors to your library with Can Edit permission. Only if you want them to consume the library assets, invite them to your library with Can View permission.
  
•  As you invite new coeditors to the document, ensure that you invite them to the linked library and provide the necessary permission.

Things to watch out for

• When you publish a library for the first time, depending on its size, might take a few minutes to publish. You can track the progress of the library publishing from the progress indicator in the libraries manager. 
• When you first accept the library invitation, it might take few minutes to sync the library. Click the cloud icon in your Creative Cloud desktop app to check the library sync status. Once the library is fully synced, you can access it from XD and other Creative Cloud apps.

Consume libraries

If you have accepted the library invite, you can start using assets from the library in XD and in other Creative Cloud apps. To use assets from the library in XD, follow the steps below:

Show or hide libraries in the Libraries panel

Update published libraries

Once you publish a library from an XD cloud document and then modify the assets in your source cloud document, XD notifies you about changes made since you last published the library in the following ways:

• An in-app message after you make changes to a published library to ease the process of updating the library. 
  
• Blue badge on Publish as a library   next in the Document Assets panel indicates that an update is ready to be published.

When you are ready to publish updates to your library, use any of these options:

Preview and accept library updates

What happens when you update and publish libraries? Your fellow designers using those updated linked assets in their design projects receive the following notifications:

• Document Assets panel view: A blue badge  on the linked assets that are pending updates, as well as the Update all button at the bottom of the panel.
• Libraries panel view: A blue badge  next to Document Assets indicating the number of updates that are pending in your document.
  

Search and filter assets

As your document assets and libraries grow in size, you can use search and filter features.

In the Document Assets panel view, enter the search term to search for assets in your document. In the Libraries panel view, search for assets across all your active libraries.

XD provides these three filtering mechanisms to narrow down the assets that you would like to use in your project:

Convert linked assets to local assets

To experiment and change certain styles or properties for a linked asset without impacting others who are using it in their documents, you can convert your linked asset to a local asset.

Relink library with source document

To learn about relinking a delinked library to its source document, see Relink library with source document.

Unpublish libraries

If you decided that you no longer need a library, you can unpublish it from the Libraries manager. To unpublish a library:

1. Open the Libraries manager from the source document of the library.
2. Click the three dots next to Share, and then click Unpublish.

When unpublished, any linked assets that were previously taken from this library will become broken links indicated by a red badge. You can either delete those broken assets or convert them to local assets.

Things to watch out for

• If you unpublish a library and later republish it, broken linked assets will not relink to that library.

Consume assets from libraries created in Creative Cloud apps

XD makes it easy for you and your teams to use assets created in different Creative Cloud apps like Photoshop and Illustrator. Whether you created an inspirational library with a collection of graphics, or Adobe Stock images, or a library with a collection of reusable colors and character styles that are not linked to a source document, you can reuse those assets in XD.

When you drag graphics from libraries to your designs, they become linked graphics indicated by the badge. Any modifications made to that linked graphic in Photoshop or Illustrator will automatically update all linked graphic instances in your design. To unlink a linked graphic, click the link badge or use the context menu to unlink it. 

To create a similar library in XD with a collection of colors, character styles, or graphics that are not linked to your document, in the Libraries manager, choose Create new > Create empty library.

Things to watch out for

• You can only add components to libraries by publishing your document as a library.
•  You cannot edit colors or character styles in your libraries.
• When adding 3D transform graphics to a library, the 3D transformation is lost.
  

Best practices

• For more control on pushing library asset updates, allowing your team to preview and accept those updates, and ensuring your team is in sync with the latest changes, we recommend publishing a linked library from a document as outlined in this article.
  

Learn more

Watch this video to learn how to work with libraries in XD.

Viewing time: 6 minutes.

What's next?

We've got you started on how to publish and share libraries, take a step forward and learn how to share design specs with your developers so that they can inspect your designs.

Have a question or an idea?